(no subject)

Brilliant parody by Simon Jenkins in yesterday’s Guardian of idiot knee-jerk think pieces:

The health-and-safety Armageddon I long expected has arrived. It was bad enough to have an idiot with a shoe bomb stirring equally idiot regulators to enforce billions of pounds of cost and inconvenience on air travellers in the cause of “it might happen again”. Now we have a volcano and a bit of dust. It is another swine flu.

The truth is that putting large, heavy bits of metal into the air is just too much for the psyche of modern regulators. They panic. The slightest risk cannot be taken or someone might blame the regulators, whose job is not to assess risk but avert it. Even an airline company, with everything to lose, is not allowed to assess its own risk. Many more will die on roads and elsewhere because of the anarchy the air controllers have unleashed on Europe, but that is not their business. They don't care.

I mean, it is a parody, right?

Best thing about it is one of the (mostly incredulous) comments underneath:

There is a scientific issue here. It's called the Littlejohn Paradox.

It's the discovery in quantum theory, that if there is some thing, which causes media commentators to accuse the authorities of overreacting to the thing, then in a parallel timeline where the authorities did not act on the thing, the metaphysical counterpart of the commentator lambasts them for that as well.

(no subject)

Last year I was at a talent show to cheer on a mate (who was just edged out of the national final). I have just found a note I scribbled in the dark at the time to commemorate a lyric by another competitor (whose absence from the final was far more of a foregone conclusion). His songs—for slightly detuned guitar and winsome troubadour—he had written himself and it showed, hitting a particularly dizzy height with the line:

#The railway of life just couldn't unfold